Audio communication in trading floor environments is achieved utilizing specialized hardware and software turret switching systems. A turret switching system is a specialized turret switching system that allows a relatively small number of users to access a large number of external lines and provides enhanced communication features such as hoot-n-holler, push-to-talk, intercom, video and large-scale conferencing.
Users interface with a turret switching system through a trading turret device, which can be implemented in dedicated hardware (sometimes referred to as a “hard” turret) or in a general-purpose computer (sometimes referred to as a “soft” turret). A hard-turret is a phone-like desktop device with multiple handsets, external microphones, speakers and buttons. A soft-turret is a software application that runs on a trader's desktop personal computer (PC) or on a mobile computer such as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). A soft-turret application may be controlled using the native control interface that the computer provides such as a touch screen, stylus, click wheel, or mouse and keyboard. In addition to rendering a graphical image of the turret on the PC screen, the soft-turret application may also provide voice, instant messaging and presence features.
Two basic types of turret calls are known as “handset calls” and “speaker calls”. Handset calls behave similarly to standard telephone calls and can be used to speak to someone else or a group of people in a conference call. An audio data stream includes a transmit channel (input audio data stream) and a receive channel (output audio data stream). Speaker Calls in a trading device have the receive channel connected to a speaker. Speaker Calls involve a push-to-talk (PTT) button which connects a microphone in a trading turret device to the transmit channel of a Speaker Call. In the case where a trading turret device is connected to multiple speaker calls, there are multiple push-to-talk buttons that can be pressed at the same time to connect the microphone of the trading turret device to the transmit channels of multiple speaker calls.